


rest for the wicked

by clytemnestras



Series: fem feb 2021 [8]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Femslash February, Femslash February 2021, Psychic Bond, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sexuality Crisis, background Prudence/Ambrose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29359335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: Sometimes she thinks she can feel the soft brush of her buzzed hair against her throat, just before her alarm shakes her back into consciousness. Sometimes she can still feel it after, too.
Relationships: Prudence Night/Rosalind “Roz” Walker
Series: fem feb 2021 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2132580
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	rest for the wicked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [preludes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/preludes/gifts), [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).



> am I ever going to stop writing these two having a psychic connection? Apparently not!
> 
> [for the ficathon prompt:](https://clockwork-hart1.dreamwidth.org/53291.html?view=1060907&posted=1#cmt1060907)  
>  _when i wake, i ask god to slide into my head quickly before i do._

The cunning had changed her in myriad ways - the way her eyes are a little harder, the way her heart is a little softer, the way her father sometimes looks at her like she’s an object of suspicion, a chimera whose form might change if left unwatched. But maybe the most profound change has been what it's done to Roz's dreams.

They have always been mundane - standing at the podium at graduation, valedictorian speech cards the only thing she could use to cover her nakedness, or taking a test where all the questions are in a language she cannot read, all of them blurry, chopped up things, moments of lucidity tangled in the ephemera of dream-logic.

Lately the dreams have been tactile. They’ve been kinetic. They've been about that scary witch girl Sabrina pulled into their orbit, Prudence, the sharp slant to her eyes, the way her tongue curls behind her teeth when she scowls. The way she prays, in the dark, her voice barely more than a quiver. _I work hard and serve you well, I pray for what is owed to me. Something to sink my teeth into. Something unequivocally mine._

Sometimes she thinks she can feel the soft brush of her buzzed hair against her throat, just before her alarm shakes her back into consciousness. Sometimes she can still feel it after, too.

  
  
  
  


It's easy to slip it into conversation, curiosity Roz's most persistent character trait, except maybe righteousness, except maybe the need to be the cleverest person in any given room, and Sabrina barely blinks in the booth at Dr Cee's when Roz takes a sip of chocolate milkshake and asks, "So, how's the Academy?"

Sabrina touches her hair, like she's still not used to the colour, used to her own strangeness. "It's different. It's harsher than here, you know? Everyone is all real hearts for Valentine's and dungeons for punishment."

"That sounds awful," Roz says, her stomach turning.

Sabrina presses her lips together. "It's another culture. They were raised without anything being unconditional, you know? Affection is weakness. You can't love the Dark Lord best if you love everybody else."

Roz can't help but think about her father, the way his congregation talk to him like the herald of something omnibenevolent. The way she's seen the poorest families tuck their last dollar into the collection plate, and don't know to demand it be turned back into their hands. "That doesn't sound anything like your family, 'Brina," she says, instead of something that would make her wince.

Sabrina smiles at that. "Well, we're Spellmans. We're special. Too transgressive for our own good."

"What about the other students, though?" Roz asks, before she can lose her quickly fraying nerve. Before Sabrina can blur at the edges any more than she already has, the little girl she used to tumble in the daisies with little more than a shadow in this new creature's eye. "What about your not-cousin, what was her name… Prudence?"

Sabrina makes a face, and Roz feels this silly little flutter in her stomach, has to stop her mouth from curling into something like _well, you don't know what she prays for at night, you don't know how delicate she is.  
_

"Prudence is going to be just fine." Sabrina adjusts her headband, fusses with her hair some more. "She's less eager to be eaten alive these days, more eager to eat Ambrose, I think."

And that's not what Roz was expecting, nor is her own reaction, a wave of nausea so strong she thinks it might drag her under. Her face must say something without her permission, because Sabrina laughs.

"It's not the biggest surprise," she says. "They had an orgy once. Nick invited me, but, um, ew."

Roz pushes her milkshake aside, the nape of her neck beginning to sweat. "There are so many images in my head right now."

Sabrina grins, eyebrows wriggling. "Rosalind, you dirty dog."

She's not even the virgin at the table, but Roz has never felt so guiltily puritanical in her life.

  
  
  


Her mind keeps turning it over. _They had an orgy, once._ With Nick, apparently. With other people, she guesses, because an orgy implies debauchery bigger than just three bodies. She wonders who else was curled up around them, writhing and seeking pleasure, unbidden the way only someone who is certain of their own demise could possibly be. She wonders if it was just Prudence and a harem of men below her, readily worshiping her, down on their knees. But if Sabrina was invited -

She drives herself a bit mad, thinking in awful, filthy circles, just like she did aged 14 flicking through the lounge TV when she couldn't sleep and saw _Wild Things_ for the first time, this terrible oroborus of _oh no, that's hot_ and _oh god, I'm going to hell for thinking that's hot._

Then again, she supposes, going to hell isn't much a threat to witches. Prudence was likely counting on it, jewelled seat carved out beside the throne.

Roz makes herself read her history textbook until her eyes swim, until her fingers are numb and her brain is too fuzzy to make out words, let alone invent bodies, and how they might move together. She shucks her glasses and switches off the lamp, sleep finding her before she has time to seek it out.

What blooms for her in the dark would make her breath catch if she had any control of that, her gaze like a restless spirit in the Academy walls.

It's Prudence, her head tipped back, another girl's copper head buried between her thighs.

Roz wants _out_ , too close, too hot and real and _maddening_ ; the curl of Prudence's fingers in the girl's carefully braided hair, the whisper of a word on her mouth, chanting in Latin. It's magic, and it's _fucking,_ the two entwined in ways Roz never would have thought of, but now probably won't ever stop, Prudence's eyes rolling back, her skin almost seemingly to shimmer as her words slur, hiccuping moans like punctuation.

The girl on her knees is relentless, and Prudence is, too.

When Roz wakes up it's on a half-cry, her cheeks burning in the dark.

  
  
  
  


Roz appreciates, sometimes, just how nondescript their church is. She's only been in a catholic church the one time, Harvey's mom's funeral, Sabrina and Roz and Theo holding hands two rows behind Harvey, like the combined touch might extend to him. She remembers how heavy all the gazes were, the saints pressed into the stained glass, the crying statue of Mary that had loomed over the congregation, resplendent and beautiful in her grief. Roz felt watched, in that church, so many eyes of God falling onto her back.

Her father's place is different, white walled, chairs in a loose curve around the pulpit. It's sort of homey, in a Methodist way, people bringing casseroles to spoon out after, flyers for knitting circles pressed, pink and lurid into the walls. Her father doesn't watch her quite so closely here, either, basking instead in the carefully cultivated attention of the congregation. The invitations to dinner. The offers to organise the charity BBQ. The older women who want him to know they are the most involved, most pious.

Her mind wanders, a lot, the scripture well known from Bible group and nasty arguments. She thinks about how Grace stubbornly refuses to learn to sit ladylike, that when she shifts on the uncomfortable wooden chair Roz catches sight of her pale, lacy underwear. She thinks about that one time Harvey came rushing out of his house on another _Sabrina Emergency_ , the football jersey straight out of _Elm Street_ only barely brushing his midriff, and Sabrina's fingers couldn't help brushing the soft edge of it. She thinks about Sabrina, since the magic shimmers on her skin, her mouth red as a fresh cut.

She doesn't think about Prudence, her mouth open on a cry.

Not even a little bit.

Her dad leads the congregation in a raucous _Amen,_ and Roz is a beat behind, her mouth a little numb from her teeth, sunken into her lower lip.

  
  
  


She keeps herself busy, there's always a new extracurricular to pad out her college transcript, always a fresh cheer to suggest, a class to study for to edge out her closest rival. She occupies her mind as much as possible, no room to wander to witchcraft, or the girl haunting her, and Harvey and Theo don't even say anything when she starts talking too fast at Dr Cee's, her voice a blur in the air around them.

Sometimes she texts Sabrina, for updates, for idle goss, and it's nice and girlish and there's nothing ulterior about it. Sabrina's replies are sprawling and enigmatic - half told rituals, the way Nick's cheekbones catch the moonlight, how the witch girls are terrible but sometimes they smile at something she says and she feels her blood simmer. She's aceing herbalism and warring with Prudence at pattern magic. It's almost wholesome, the way she tells it.

The blue light from Roz's phonescreen burns in the dark.

  
  
  


Prudence's head is bowed, the colour like the curve of the moon in the gloom, her mouth moving whisper-softly.

"I can feel you," she says, "watching me. If you're waiting to ask something of me in exchange for prayer, I'm listening."

And the fear jolts Roz straight into wakefulness - _She's conscious. She thinks I'm her God._

Roz keeps herself awake all night, pouring over the shape of the words on Prudence's mouth, of the weight of her own gaze in the gloom of the academy. She feels sick, like a filthy voyeur. Like something she doesn't want to associate herself with. Like something hungry. Like something that belongs, just a little, in the dark.

  
  
  
  


Harvey catches her in English the next day, just after her head hits the desk with a thud, exhaustion finally claiming her, and smiles his soft smile at the nurse until she chucks his chin and lets him drive Roz home.

"What's going on with you, lately? You don't seem like you." He asks her, the stereo buzzing between them, Tommy's Indigo Girls tape.

"You noticed, huh?"

He turns to her, eyes bigger than the sky and twice as depthless. "Of course I noticed. You're very noticeable. And I've known you since diapers, I'd like to think I'd be able to tell if we had an invasion of the body snatchers deal."

Her cheeks pink, a little, feeling caught out. "I feel different," she tells him, fiddling with her seatbelt. "Since the cunning. Since Sabrina left. I feel like I'm evolving into something and I don't even know what it _is_."

"Well," he says, pulling up to her house. "Even if, by some strange happenstance - it's Greendale, who knows - you evolve into some great and terrible _Attack Of the Fifty Foot Psychic_ creature, I'll still drive you home when you're feeling iffy."

"You'd need a bigger truck," she tells him, unclipping her seatbelt.

He grabs her wrist as she feels for the door handle and pulls her into a warm, crushing hug, something she didn't know she needed until she's clinging hard to his shoulders. "I'd work something out," he promises. 

  
  
  


She stews in her room for a few hours, too afraid to sleep, too wired to do anything else before she bites the bullet and heads to the Spellman place. She texts Sabrina as she goes. _Something's weird with the cunning, I'm omw to yours._

Sabrina's reply is swift. _aye aye, cap'n. teleporting as we speak._

  
  
  
  


When she arrives at the Spellman house it's Ambrose who opens the door, as it often is, and she almost can't look at him, before she realises that's ridiculous. He welcomes her warmly, and she smiles like she isn't shaking a little bit inside, when a hand curves around his front and pulls him back inside. 

Prudence catches her eye around the door, sneers and looks just beyond, like Roz is not, in fact, there, at all.

It's like relief, only colder.

She's inches from running home when Hilda's voice rings out from the hallway, says, "Rosalind, Sabrina let us know you were on the way, so I sneaked some brownies from Doctor Cee's, come in, come in."

And she's a simple girl, easily enticed by chocolate and home comforts, so she's seated at the dining table before she's really managed to collect her thoughts.

Sabrina bounds downstairs and wraps her arms around her, brows furrowed, embrace warm, and Roz has missed this, burying her face in Sabrina's hair and sharing the warmth. "Are you okay?" Sabrina whispers, her nose cold against Roz's ear.

"Yeah," she manages back, which is exactly when the vision hits. There's a fissure of electricity right between her eyes, a flash of Prudence's gaze, sharp and narrowed, then the vision unfolds proper, two bodies curled together and moving, the path fingernails cut down the dark skin of someone's spine, the hot press of two bodies, of two mouths, bodies so close their boundaries blur -

" _You,_ " Prudence says, full of venom, her hand around Roz's throat before the imagery has fully cleared.

Sabrina yells, and Ambrose presses an arm between them, and with a word Roz can't quite pick out, Zelda has flung them both to opposite sides of the room. Roz pants and doesn't look away from Prudence's hard eyes.

Prudence gathers herself like an animal ready to spring, and doesn't look away from her either.

"What in Satan's name is going on here?" Zelda hisses, her cigarette barely drooping in its holder.

"That wicked little mortal has been spying on me," Prudence snarls, her lip curled in a way Roz cannot imagine her face could match, something wild and distinctly inhuman.

"Not on purpose!" She hears herself saying, something pleading in her voice. She barely notices she's clinging to Sabrina's arm until she trembles, the solidity holding her up. "It's the cunning, I couldn't control it, I just kept seeing you, and I didn't know how to get out."

"Roz?" Sabrina's voice is tentative, her fingers soft against her forehead. It's nice, Roz thinks, absently, her rational mind far beyond the room. They used to do that as kids, play doctor, play nurse. Roz learned all the medical terminology and Sabrina laughed and winked and said, or _I could just kiss it better. It's magic, you know._

She steels herself and straightens up. "When I sleep, I've started having visions. _Visions of Prudence_ , except they aren't so much… predictions as me being there, in the room with her."

"Watching me," Prudence hisses.

"It's not like I asked for this," Roz bites back, debate team spirit flooding into her voice. "I'm trying to adjust to having power at all, I didn't pray to have some connection with a girl I'm pretty sure would kill me for a chocolate muffin."

Prudence smiles, then, dark and nasty. "Pray?" She leans forward, out of Ambrose's grasp. "What do you pray for, then? Seeing as turnabout is fair play. You know my infernal demands." She steps across the room, Sabrina's arm tightening across Roz's midsection, but Roz pushes her away.

"Okay," Roz tells Prudence, refusing to do anything but meet her eyes. "I'll tell you what you want to know, make up for the things I've seen, although from that shared vision, I'm not sure this is a one way street anymore anyway. But," she's pointing, which feels petulant, and a bit stupid, but Prudence's gaze follows the line of her finger, up her throat, right to her eyes. "Privately. Just you and me."

" _Roz,_ " Sabrina grabs her by the shoulders, shaking her a little. "You don't have to do this."

"Come now, Sabrina. Your mortal friend has made her demand. I always prefer a girl who knows what she wants." Prudence leans in even closer, seems to grow three sizes on the carpet in front of her. "Where do you want me?" She asks, one sharp eyebrow raised.

  
  
  


Ambrose offers the morgue, and Roz must make a face because before she knows it she's being hustled into Sabrina's bedroom, Prudence breezing by beside her, impassivity in the shape of a girl.

Prudence plants herself on Sabrina's bed, her long limbs stretched out, the fall of her red lace cardigan almost too artful, her black dress crawling up her thighs when she leans back. Roz swallows and lingers by the door. "So," she says, staring at pretty much anything but the girl reclining for her, smiling at her obvious discomfort. "What do you want to know?"

Prudence cocks her head. "You don't have to look so nervous."

"You tried to strangle me thirty seconds ago," Roz points out, because it's true, and because actually, she will feel nervous if she damn well pleases.

"I'm a witch, that's practically a handshake." Prudence grins and pats the bed beside her. "Get off your feet, at least. What's the point of sharing intimate secrets if there's no intimacy to the affair?"

Roz swallows. _Affair_. She's growing more and more certain Prudence is trying to screw with her. People don't actually speak like that. Still, she's a stubborn girl, and she won't be outdone, not even in the name of reparation. Roz sits on the edge of Sabrina's bed, like she used to when she stayed over, both of them curled up tightly, whispering stories into the dark.

Spiritually, this is not much different. In reality, Prudence is a dangerous creature, unsafe in a way Sabrina never feels, even when she maybe should. Roz toes off her boots and gathers herself onto the bed, not comfortable, exactly, but close enough that she hopes Prudence won't make anymore asides.

"Good girl," Prudence says, instead, and Roz feels all the blood drain from her face.

"I'm not a dog," Roz says a little too quickly, her fingernails biting into her thighs.

Prudence just laughs again. "No," she agrees. "You certainly aren't." She twists so they're facing each other, faces close enough for the warmth of her breath to ghost along Roz's cheeks. "I know what it's like, you know. My sisters and I, half feral and entirely strange, managed to insert our claws so firmly in one another we developed our own channel, thoughts flooding between us until none could be sure who started it."

Roz swallows. "Sounds invasive," she says, and Prudence aches a brow, which, fair enough. "But also, kinda nice? The closeness, I mean. Loving someone so much you can't tell what belongs to you or them. Like sharing a bookshelf, the books piled on with no mind to who they belong to, just that they belong."

Prudence tilts her head, as if parsing the thought. Roz wonders if she's thinking of Ambrose. If she's just thinking of having a homestead at all. "You mortals do say the most romantic drivel, don't you?"

And Roz has to laugh. "It's all our fairytales. They got defanged."

"A shame," Prudence says, examining her reflection in the shiny surface of her black painted nails. "Now, we haven't all day. What was it you wanted to… share?"

There's something about the way she says it, her eyes dark, that makes Roz feel like a prey animal.

Still, she knows biology well enough. They tend to be the smartest. "An eye for an eye," she tells Prudence, her father's voice ringing like a bell inside her skull. "What did you feel I had violated, and what would you like in return?"

Prudence considers this, a hum low in her throat. "The prayers, obviously, were private, between myself and the Dark Lord, and I'd like to know what a girl like you, that infernal little cross around your throat could possibly feel fit to ask your pious, false god for."

Roz opens her mouth, but Prudence stops her with a finger on her lips, which, okay. That probably shouldn't make her heart speed up.

"Ah-ah-ah, be patient. I'm not finished. Don't think I didn't feel your filthy little gaze crawling over Dorcas and I. Tell me, Rosalind, did you gasp yourself awake? Did you see that girl's head between my legs and ache to be in her position?"

Roz can feel her skin heating, her jaw tense, lips pursed under Prudence's touch.

Prudence smiles. "I knew it. I could taste desire on you. What does your god think of that?"

There's a moment when the bed seems to drop away from beneath her. Where Roz thinks of the dark struggle she's fought for years, knowing with furious certainty that liking girls, liking _anyone,_ frankly, is perfectly natural. That a just God would never punish his people for having the desire to love each other, fiercely and tenderly. That Jesus kissed Judas on the mouth, that he told a male centurion his love for his servant was pure. And then God is there, the shape of him the shape of her Father's shadow, hands fisted around the pulpit.

Something furious flares in Roz. She pushes Prudence away and balls her hands by her sides. "I _know_ what I am, I know I'm good, at least my god doesn't ask me to forsake love of anyone else who could hold me together so there's always enough room for him."

Prudence looks at her curiously, then reaches out again, her fingers touching the curve of Roz's jaw. "So that's it," she says softly, pressing herself so slowly into Roz's space she hardly notices until she's surrounded by her. "That's why you heard me."

"What do you mean?" Roz's voice is smothered to a whisper, she can't think of a thing but Prudence's touch, the gentleness of it, the way that gentleness has spread across her features in a way she can hardly comprehend.

"I asked the Dark Lord for a gift, remember? Something just for me to sink my teeth into. You asked your god to tell you you were normal. Instead they battled, tied us together." Her fingers brush across her temples, across the hinge of her jaw, so feather-light Roz can hardly stand it. "Men are such boresome creatures, they think if you put two women, equal, but opposed, together they'll seek to cancel the other out." She touches Roz's chin, tilts it up so their gazes burn together. "But I think we can do better than that."

Roz doesn't know how it happens. How her hands end up fisted in the fragile lace of her cardigan, how her body has twisted enough to arch up against Prudence, how their mouths end up pressing together, hot and sweet and so delicate she's almost afraid to exhale in case the moment shatters. Her mind is consumed, a thousand images of Prudence with lovers, with Prudence at prayer, of Prudence's desire, something intangible and ephemeral, a burning, red thing parting to make space for her, a body on an altar, limbs spread wide.

When she pulls back Roz feels more awake than she can remember. Prudence's eyes are alight.

"I saw you, little seer." She tells her, their chests brushing where they're both reaching for breath. "I saw inside your mind. Your desires." Her mouth is open, a little wet, her lipstick a little bit messed up from Roz's mouth.

"I saw you, too." Roz's hand finds the back of her head, tugs Prudence forward so their lips can brush again.

"What do you want?" Prudence teases, letting herself be led. "Tell me, Rosalind."

"I want you to shut up and kiss me again," Roz tells her, her voice too hard against the roughness of her throat.

Prudence obliges, presses her back into Sabrina's bed and kisses her breathless, their legs tangling together, their chests pressing close. It's nothing like her fumbles with boys, where they'd just mash their mouths in something like a rhythm, hips trying to make space for themselves in her body. Prudence kisses her deliberately, teasing, soft presses of her lips followed by filthily teasing the seam of her lips and sweeping inside. She sinks her fingers into Roz's hair, flits her fingers along Roz's side until she's shivering, until she's arching up as if saying, _please, more, yes._

Prudence kisses her, and Roz's mind goes blank for the first time in weeks.

  
  
  


When they go downstairs Prudence loops her arm through Roz's, almost casually, almost as if she hasn't ravished her and pulled apart her carefully constructed composure like a cat with a ball of yarn.

Sabrina eyes them warily. "All made up?"

Prudence grins at her, her nails biting into Roz's skin. "Something like that," she says. "Apparently some mortals are more amenable than others."

Roz shouldn't blush, but she does, and Sabrina can see it, _Ambrose_ can probably see it, and she can't even make herself care. Prudence's skin is stingingly warm against hers, the soft _girlness_ of it all swallowing up her senses.

Prudence sees her to the door, pressing her into the doorframe and kissing her senseless again, her hands curled around her throat not a threat now, but a delicate brush of danger that makes her pulse race beneath the touch. When they pull back her legs are weak, and Prudence smiles lazily at the mess she's made.

Her phone buzzes moments later, Sabrina, her face pressed up against the living room window. _KISSING?????_

Roz waves, a little sheepish and replies, _I guess?_ And cannot fathom how to explain it better.

Heat burns low in her belly, suffocating the nervous butterflies the entire walk home.

  
  
  


Alone, in the dark, Roz lets her eyes fall close, let's the dark swallow her.

"Are you watching me, little seer?" Prudence whispers, curled up on her side in the academy dorm, sheets only loosely draped over her back.

"Yes," Roz breathes, imagining curling around her, pressing her forehead into the gap between her shoulder blades where the nightdress dips low.

"Mmm," Prudence whispers back, as if she can feel it. "That would be nice."

"What are you thinking about?" Roz asks, her voice like a cool shadow in the dark.

"I'm thinking of what exquisite suffering it is, feeling the gaze of a beautiful girl on my back without being able to touch her. It's almost… religious." Her smile is sly, Roz can see the white glint of her teeth in the darkness.

"Yes," she says again, remembering the warmth of her mouth, of Prudence's hips settled on hers and shifting just enough to spark stars across her vision. " _Yes_."

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr! [@bohemicns](http://www.bohemicns.tumblr.com), let's chat!


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